full transcript

From the Ted Talk by James Orsulak: Why we need to move manufacturing off-planet

Unscramble the Blue Letters

All of the resources that we have ever used as a civilization have come from the same place. Everything. All the energy, the fuels, minerals, metals, construction mletiraas. The water, the air that you're breathing right now. Every resource that we've ever used has come from the same place: Earth. Now, this actually pseernts a severe problem, because when we study biological hirtsoy, we very quickly see that any time there's a dominant species in a finite eceotyssm, consuming a limited amount of resources, that species will calsolpe. Now, that collapse usually begins at 50%. When a species has converted 50% of its environment, the ecosystem becomes unstable, and it changes. It’s no longer suitable for that particular species. Now, here’s the scary part. There are 7 billion people on this pealnt. We are the dominant species. And we’ve certonevd 43% of the available land mass on Earth. By the year 2050, there will be 9 billion people on our planet and we will be well past 50%. That means most of the people sitting in this auditorium will see this begin. We don’t know exactly what it's going to look like, we don't know exactly what the impact is going to be, but the worst case scenario is the end of the human race. Because Earth is no longer suitable for human life. Now, the reason that this problem extiss is because it’s in our nature. Human beings consume resources. They aletr their environment so they can reproduce. It’s the very definition of biological life. The peorblm is we’re running out of room, we're rinunng out of resources and now we're running out of time. So we need a plan. What if - what if there was a way that we could make our ecosystem bigger? If we expand our view and we look out into space, we see that all the resources we hold of value here at home - enregy, fleus, matles, water - are available in nearly infinite quantities in our solar system. What if there’s a way we could use those ruoescers to prevent the collapse of our civilization? Now, I know, that sounds iioplmbsse. It sounds like science fiction. But I have a different viewpoint than you do. I work with some of the smartest people in the world: engineers who have consistently landed robtos on other planets; a lot of scientists, rocket scientists, data scientists, planetary scientists, artificial intelligence experts. I’m the head of strategic partnerships for the largest asteroid-mining company in the world. And I believe we can use the resources of space to save our planet. We have proven again and again that we know how to destroy an environment. Now it’s time for us to prove that we can save it. From my vagntae point, I see that there's more cinpomtug power in your car’s key fob than we use to send the astronauts to the Moon. That means we can do incredible things in space with cheap, affordable robots. For the very first time in history we’ve amassed the thcoinecgloal tolikot that we need to dispatch autonomous robotic explorers out into the solar system to find and access these resources and put them to work. Imagine a future where the resources we need do not only come from this planet, a future where we have access to the vast resources of space and we are using them to improve life here on Earth. That’s the furtue I’m going to show you. It all starts with water. See, taody if you want water in sacpe you have to take that resource, you have to load it onto a rocket and launch it into space. Now, that’s a shame because there’s a lot of water in space. There’s water on asteroids, on comets, on the poles of our Moon, and on other planets. Water is everywhere in space. And that’s a good thing because water is one of the most critical resources we will need. You see, this plan involves a lot of robots, but it also involves a lot of people. People will be liinvg and wnkorig in space to make this possible. And those people need water for sustenance, for hgeyine, for growing food. But water in space is also fuel. If we pass wtear through an electrical field, we can pourdce liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. That’s high-efficiency rocket plrenapolt. So if the source water from space and turn it into reockt propellant, we can set up fuel depots in the solar system, gas stations! And when we do that, for the first time we have access to this new resource base because we’re not trying to launch all our fuel from Earth. And now that we have access, we can turn our sights to the next step: crcutnotsion. You see, asteroids are also made of pure, high-quality metals: nickel, iron, cobalt, platinum. This is the first object that was created from an asteroid. It was the 3D-printed from a meteorite. It’s very heavy, it’s very sotnrg, you’d never want to launch something like this into space from Earth. But if you socure metals from space and feed them to orbital construction robots - which by the way, that's already a thing, we already have that - then you can create structures that are no longer limited by size. See, this is the International Space Station. It is the most expensive object humans have ever built. It cost a hundred billion dollars. Why was it so enxsvipee? Well, it was created using the resources of Earth, that were turned into products, laeodd onto rockets, launched into space and then assembled by humans. But that’s backwards. It doesn’t make sense amoryne. That’s like rhlgouy the equivalent of you living in Europe and saying, "I’m going to move to the United States and build a house there, but I’m going to ship all the materials to build that house across the ocean; all of the wood, the metal, the plumbing, the electrical, the soewhr heads, I'm going to ship it across the oacen,'' when all of the resources you need are already there at your dnoesiittan. It doesn't make sense. We can rcdeue the cost and logistical inefficiencies of building large livable structures in space by a factor of a hundred by simply srcioung what we need from our destination. So we can build things in space! What should we build? Well, energy is the sglnie largest driver of resource consumption in the world. We mine for coal. We drill for oil and natural gas. We mine for metals to build our wind plants. We mine for silicon to make our solar panels. We mine for nikecl to make batteries so we can store it. One thing remains the same. As the population gwros, so does the energy damned, so does the rousrece consumption that goes with it. We've always assumed that our energy production must hpeapn here on Earth because there's never been an alternative, because we haven't built one. If we use the resources of space, we can create massive, kilometer-scale solar farms in space. These huge facilities will capture the energy of the sun, that shines in space 24 hours a day, and beam that energy back to Earth. The technology to do this exists today, but it's smlipy too expensive when we try to use the resources of Earth. But if we use the resources in space, we can create planetary-scale macrogrids. You've hread of the electricity grid, maybe you've heard of the microgrid. This is the opposite. This is a planetary-scale, power-generation system. It's the energy that we need and the energy is in space. It's not the resources brieud under our feet. So we have water, fuel, construction capabilities, now power, we have all of the utilities we need to build cities in space. oaribtl megastructures spun up to produce artificial gravity so they're livable for large populations. These are emerging today as commercial space stations. They're research labs for sovereign astronauts from around the world; hotels for adventurous tourists, certainly. But the primary function of these facilities will be mctafarnuinug. We will build things in space. It starts with satellites and specfcarat. Why would we want to build satellites in space? Today when we build a satellite, it's constrained by the rocket that takes it to space. It has to be built and designed to fit on top of that rocket. And it has to be designed to survive the violent rocket launch to the aomertphse. (Mimicking a rocket) (Laughter) But if we remove that constraint, we can build things that are as big as our imagination and vastly more capable. And if we've come this far, we can take the final step and we can start to solve our resource crisis. We can move our industrial manufacturing into space, all of it. You see, manufacturing is resource consumption. We use the resources of Earth, we turn them into manufactured products, so we can sell them and do useful things. That is what drives creomcme on Earth. But what if we reverse that? What if we gather and hsavret all of our raw materials and resources from deep space and iprmot them to an orbital manufacturing ring around the planet, and then return only the finished products to the surface? Let's use your smartphone as an example. This was created using raw materials from Earth. Yet, every single one of the raw materials in this exists in iinfitne qeiaiutnts in space. The most expensive component of your pnohe is platinum, and platinum is readily available in near-earth asteroids pissnag by us all the time. This is created here on Earth using the resources of Earth, in a factory that peucodrs emissions, consumes resources. They use toxic cchailems like bneznee to produce this. And that factory produces hazardous waste that's the byproduct of manufacturing. That's the bad stuff: poisons, toxins, heavy metals, radiation. The problem is all of the hazardous waste from manufacturing is stuck with us here in the finite ecosystem that we live in. It's poisoning our air, our water, our fish, our wildlife, our food our kids! Do you know where this should not be made? (Laughter) (Breathing in) (bainerhtg out) (Laughter) In the only breathable atmosphere that we know of anywhere, a resource that we take for granted every muntie of every day. So if we do this, we reverse the human supply chain, we push all of our mining and manufacturing outside the atmosphere, what have we done? We've now zneod the ertah for residential access only. inamgie if you walked outside one day and there were no factories, no pweor plants, no refineries, no oil rigs, no pipelines to poretst, and instead we simply allowed the planet to return to a more natural state, we innnlltaietoy stabilized our environment. We'd have more space here on Earth, more room for the population, because we're not trying to live on top of our consumable resource base. And to be clear, this is not a vision about scarcity. And yes, we still have to conserve all of the precious resources we have here at home. But this is a vision about abundance. It's about having ascecs to all of the resources we need to grow as a civilization. They're simply coming from a different place. Now, I know, I know this sounds impossible, but it's happening fast, faster than you could ever imagine, and it's already statred. My kids are two. By the time they're in high school, they will see operational asteroid mneis. They'll grow up in a world knowing that the resources we need do not simply come from only this planet. As a parent this gives me a lot of hope, because I want to craete a wolrd for those kids that gets better and better, not worse and worse. And when someone asks them, "Why we should be exploring space when we have so many permblos here at home?", they will know the answer to that. The resources of space are the suonliots to our greatest problems. It is only by exploring space that we safeguard this world, the one that matters the most. This is what I ask of you: believe that this is possible, because for the very first time in human history, it is possible. When we access the infinite resources of space, we do so so we can protect and preserve the single most important asset that we know of anywhere in the ursnieve, the only plcae that we know of that can support human life: our home, Earth. Thank you. (Applause)

Open Cloze

All of the resources that we have ever used as a civilization have come from the same place. Everything. All the energy, the fuels, minerals, metals, construction _________. The water, the air that you're breathing right now. Every resource that we've ever used has come from the same place: Earth. Now, this actually ________ a severe problem, because when we study biological _______, we very quickly see that any time there's a dominant species in a finite _________, consuming a limited amount of resources, that species will ________. Now, that collapse usually begins at 50%. When a species has converted 50% of its environment, the ecosystem becomes unstable, and it changes. It’s no longer suitable for that particular species. Now, here’s the scary part. There are 7 billion people on this ______. We are the dominant species. And we’ve _________ 43% of the available land mass on Earth. By the year 2050, there will be 9 billion people on our planet and we will be well past 50%. That means most of the people sitting in this auditorium will see this begin. We don’t know exactly what it's going to look like, we don't know exactly what the impact is going to be, but the worst case scenario is the end of the human race. Because Earth is no longer suitable for human life. Now, the reason that this problem ______ is because it’s in our nature. Human beings consume resources. They _____ their environment so they can reproduce. It’s the very definition of biological life. The _______ is we’re running out of room, we're _______ out of resources and now we're running out of time. So we need a plan. What if - what if there was a way that we could make our ecosystem bigger? If we expand our view and we look out into space, we see that all the resources we hold of value here at home - ______, _____, ______, water - are available in nearly infinite quantities in our solar system. What if there’s a way we could use those _________ to prevent the collapse of our civilization? Now, I know, that sounds __________. It sounds like science fiction. But I have a different viewpoint than you do. I work with some of the smartest people in the world: engineers who have consistently landed ______ on other planets; a lot of scientists, rocket scientists, data scientists, planetary scientists, artificial intelligence experts. I’m the head of strategic partnerships for the largest asteroid-mining company in the world. And I believe we can use the resources of space to save our planet. We have proven again and again that we know how to destroy an environment. Now it’s time for us to prove that we can save it. From my _______ point, I see that there's more _________ power in your car’s key fob than we use to send the astronauts to the Moon. That means we can do incredible things in space with cheap, affordable robots. For the very first time in history we’ve amassed the _____________ _______ that we need to dispatch autonomous robotic explorers out into the solar system to find and access these resources and put them to work. Imagine a future where the resources we need do not only come from this planet, a future where we have access to the vast resources of space and we are using them to improve life here on Earth. That’s the ______ I’m going to show you. It all starts with water. See, _____ if you want water in _____ you have to take that resource, you have to load it onto a rocket and launch it into space. Now, that’s a shame because there’s a lot of water in space. There’s water on asteroids, on comets, on the poles of our Moon, and on other planets. Water is everywhere in space. And that’s a good thing because water is one of the most critical resources we will need. You see, this plan involves a lot of robots, but it also involves a lot of people. People will be ______ and _______ in space to make this possible. And those people need water for sustenance, for _______, for growing food. But water in space is also fuel. If we pass _____ through an electrical field, we can _______ liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. That’s high-efficiency rocket __________. So if the source water from space and turn it into ______ propellant, we can set up fuel depots in the solar system, gas stations! And when we do that, for the first time we have access to this new resource base because we’re not trying to launch all our fuel from Earth. And now that we have access, we can turn our sights to the next step: ____________. You see, asteroids are also made of pure, high-quality metals: nickel, iron, cobalt, platinum. This is the first object that was created from an asteroid. It was the 3D-printed from a meteorite. It’s very heavy, it’s very ______, you’d never want to launch something like this into space from Earth. But if you ______ metals from space and feed them to orbital construction robots - which by the way, that's already a thing, we already have that - then you can create structures that are no longer limited by size. See, this is the International Space Station. It is the most expensive object humans have ever built. It cost a hundred billion dollars. Why was it so _________? Well, it was created using the resources of Earth, that were turned into products, ______ onto rockets, launched into space and then assembled by humans. But that’s backwards. It doesn’t make sense _______. That’s like _______ the equivalent of you living in Europe and saying, "I’m going to move to the United States and build a house there, but I’m going to ship all the materials to build that house across the ocean; all of the wood, the metal, the plumbing, the electrical, the ______ heads, I'm going to ship it across the _____,'' when all of the resources you need are already there at your ___________. It doesn't make sense. We can ______ the cost and logistical inefficiencies of building large livable structures in space by a factor of a hundred by simply ________ what we need from our destination. So we can build things in space! What should we build? Well, energy is the ______ largest driver of resource consumption in the world. We mine for coal. We drill for oil and natural gas. We mine for metals to build our wind plants. We mine for silicon to make our solar panels. We mine for ______ to make batteries so we can store it. One thing remains the same. As the population _____, so does the energy ______, so does the ________ consumption that goes with it. We've always assumed that our energy production must ______ here on Earth because there's never been an alternative, because we haven't built one. If we use the resources of space, we can create massive, kilometer-scale solar farms in space. These huge facilities will capture the energy of the sun, that shines in space 24 hours a day, and beam that energy back to Earth. The technology to do this exists today, but it's ______ too expensive when we try to use the resources of Earth. But if we use the resources in space, we can create planetary-scale macrogrids. You've _____ of the electricity grid, maybe you've heard of the microgrid. This is the opposite. This is a planetary-scale, power-generation system. It's the energy that we need and the energy is in space. It's not the resources ______ under our feet. So we have water, fuel, construction capabilities, now power, we have all of the utilities we need to build cities in space. _______ megastructures spun up to produce artificial gravity so they're livable for large populations. These are emerging today as commercial space stations. They're research labs for sovereign astronauts from around the world; hotels for adventurous tourists, certainly. But the primary function of these facilities will be _____________. We will build things in space. It starts with satellites and __________. Why would we want to build satellites in space? Today when we build a satellite, it's constrained by the rocket that takes it to space. It has to be built and designed to fit on top of that rocket. And it has to be designed to survive the violent rocket launch to the __________. (Mimicking a rocket) (Laughter) But if we remove that constraint, we can build things that are as big as our imagination and vastly more capable. And if we've come this far, we can take the final step and we can start to solve our resource crisis. We can move our industrial manufacturing into space, all of it. You see, manufacturing is resource consumption. We use the resources of Earth, we turn them into manufactured products, so we can sell them and do useful things. That is what drives ________ on Earth. But what if we reverse that? What if we gather and _______ all of our raw materials and resources from deep space and ______ them to an orbital manufacturing ring around the planet, and then return only the finished products to the surface? Let's use your smartphone as an example. This was created using raw materials from Earth. Yet, every single one of the raw materials in this exists in ________ __________ in space. The most expensive component of your _____ is platinum, and platinum is readily available in near-earth asteroids _______ by us all the time. This is created here on Earth using the resources of Earth, in a factory that ________ emissions, consumes resources. They use toxic _________ like _______ to produce this. And that factory produces hazardous waste that's the byproduct of manufacturing. That's the bad stuff: poisons, toxins, heavy metals, radiation. The problem is all of the hazardous waste from manufacturing is stuck with us here in the finite ecosystem that we live in. It's poisoning our air, our water, our fish, our wildlife, our food our kids! Do you know where this should not be made? (Laughter) (Breathing in) (_________ out) (Laughter) In the only breathable atmosphere that we know of anywhere, a resource that we take for granted every ______ of every day. So if we do this, we reverse the human supply chain, we push all of our mining and manufacturing outside the atmosphere, what have we done? We've now _____ the _____ for residential access only. _______ if you walked outside one day and there were no factories, no _____ plants, no refineries, no oil rigs, no pipelines to _______, and instead we simply allowed the planet to return to a more natural state, we _____________ stabilized our environment. We'd have more space here on Earth, more room for the population, because we're not trying to live on top of our consumable resource base. And to be clear, this is not a vision about scarcity. And yes, we still have to conserve all of the precious resources we have here at home. But this is a vision about abundance. It's about having ______ to all of the resources we need to grow as a civilization. They're simply coming from a different place. Now, I know, I know this sounds impossible, but it's happening fast, faster than you could ever imagine, and it's already _______. My kids are two. By the time they're in high school, they will see operational asteroid _____. They'll grow up in a world knowing that the resources we need do not simply come from only this planet. As a parent this gives me a lot of hope, because I want to ______ a _____ for those kids that gets better and better, not worse and worse. And when someone asks them, "Why we should be exploring space when we have so many ________ here at home?", they will know the answer to that. The resources of space are the _________ to our greatest problems. It is only by exploring space that we safeguard this world, the one that matters the most. This is what I ask of you: believe that this is possible, because for the very first time in human history, it is possible. When we access the infinite resources of space, we do so so we can protect and preserve the single most important asset that we know of anywhere in the ________, the only _____ that we know of that can support human life: our home, Earth. Thank you. (Applause)

Solution

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  2. single
  3. mines
  4. collapse
  5. strong
  6. history
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  8. benzene
  9. alter
  10. shower
  11. import
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  13. minute
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  15. solutions
  16. working
  17. resources
  18. grows
  19. simply
  20. materials
  21. exists
  22. ocean
  23. reduce
  24. roughly
  25. ecosystem
  26. toolkit
  27. loaded
  28. produces
  29. space
  30. expensive
  31. heard
  32. breathing
  33. energy
  34. water
  35. today
  36. future
  37. manufacturing
  38. destination
  39. rocket
  40. atmosphere
  41. access
  42. converted
  43. power
  44. passing
  45. commerce
  46. robots
  47. living
  48. orbital
  49. happen
  50. hygiene
  51. problems
  52. demand
  53. zoned
  54. universe
  55. computing
  56. fuels
  57. place
  58. create
  59. infinite
  60. technological
  61. chemicals
  62. running
  63. problem
  64. metals
  65. protest
  66. quantities
  67. source
  68. anymore
  69. spacecraft
  70. presents
  71. vantage
  72. earth
  73. started
  74. produce
  75. nickel
  76. propellant
  77. sourcing
  78. buried
  79. resource
  80. intentionally
  81. phone
  82. harvest
  83. planet

Original Text

All of the resources that we have ever used as a civilization have come from the same place. Everything. All the energy, the fuels, minerals, metals, construction materials. The water, the air that you're breathing right now. Every resource that we've ever used has come from the same place: Earth. Now, this actually presents a severe problem, because when we study biological history, we very quickly see that any time there's a dominant species in a finite ecosystem, consuming a limited amount of resources, that species will collapse. Now, that collapse usually begins at 50%. When a species has converted 50% of its environment, the ecosystem becomes unstable, and it changes. It’s no longer suitable for that particular species. Now, here’s the scary part. There are 7 billion people on this planet. We are the dominant species. And we’ve converted 43% of the available land mass on Earth. By the year 2050, there will be 9 billion people on our planet and we will be well past 50%. That means most of the people sitting in this auditorium will see this begin. We don’t know exactly what it's going to look like, we don't know exactly what the impact is going to be, but the worst case scenario is the end of the human race. Because Earth is no longer suitable for human life. Now, the reason that this problem exists is because it’s in our nature. Human beings consume resources. They alter their environment so they can reproduce. It’s the very definition of biological life. The problem is we’re running out of room, we're running out of resources and now we're running out of time. So we need a plan. What if - what if there was a way that we could make our ecosystem bigger? If we expand our view and we look out into space, we see that all the resources we hold of value here at home - energy, fuels, metals, water - are available in nearly infinite quantities in our solar system. What if there’s a way we could use those resources to prevent the collapse of our civilization? Now, I know, that sounds impossible. It sounds like science fiction. But I have a different viewpoint than you do. I work with some of the smartest people in the world: engineers who have consistently landed robots on other planets; a lot of scientists, rocket scientists, data scientists, planetary scientists, artificial intelligence experts. I’m the head of strategic partnerships for the largest asteroid-mining company in the world. And I believe we can use the resources of space to save our planet. We have proven again and again that we know how to destroy an environment. Now it’s time for us to prove that we can save it. From my vantage point, I see that there's more computing power in your car’s key fob than we use to send the astronauts to the Moon. That means we can do incredible things in space with cheap, affordable robots. For the very first time in history we’ve amassed the technological toolkit that we need to dispatch autonomous robotic explorers out into the solar system to find and access these resources and put them to work. Imagine a future where the resources we need do not only come from this planet, a future where we have access to the vast resources of space and we are using them to improve life here on Earth. That’s the future I’m going to show you. It all starts with water. See, today if you want water in space you have to take that resource, you have to load it onto a rocket and launch it into space. Now, that’s a shame because there’s a lot of water in space. There’s water on asteroids, on comets, on the poles of our Moon, and on other planets. Water is everywhere in space. And that’s a good thing because water is one of the most critical resources we will need. You see, this plan involves a lot of robots, but it also involves a lot of people. People will be living and working in space to make this possible. And those people need water for sustenance, for hygiene, for growing food. But water in space is also fuel. If we pass water through an electrical field, we can produce liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. That’s high-efficiency rocket propellant. So if the source water from space and turn it into rocket propellant, we can set up fuel depots in the solar system, gas stations! And when we do that, for the first time we have access to this new resource base because we’re not trying to launch all our fuel from Earth. And now that we have access, we can turn our sights to the next step: construction. You see, asteroids are also made of pure, high-quality metals: nickel, iron, cobalt, platinum. This is the first object that was created from an asteroid. It was the 3D-printed from a meteorite. It’s very heavy, it’s very strong, you’d never want to launch something like this into space from Earth. But if you source metals from space and feed them to orbital construction robots - which by the way, that's already a thing, we already have that - then you can create structures that are no longer limited by size. See, this is the International Space Station. It is the most expensive object humans have ever built. It cost a hundred billion dollars. Why was it so expensive? Well, it was created using the resources of Earth, that were turned into products, loaded onto rockets, launched into space and then assembled by humans. But that’s backwards. It doesn’t make sense anymore. That’s like roughly the equivalent of you living in Europe and saying, "I’m going to move to the United States and build a house there, but I’m going to ship all the materials to build that house across the ocean; all of the wood, the metal, the plumbing, the electrical, the shower heads, I'm going to ship it across the ocean,'' when all of the resources you need are already there at your destination. It doesn't make sense. We can reduce the cost and logistical inefficiencies of building large livable structures in space by a factor of a hundred by simply sourcing what we need from our destination. So we can build things in space! What should we build? Well, energy is the single largest driver of resource consumption in the world. We mine for coal. We drill for oil and natural gas. We mine for metals to build our wind plants. We mine for silicon to make our solar panels. We mine for nickel to make batteries so we can store it. One thing remains the same. As the population grows, so does the energy demand, so does the resource consumption that goes with it. We've always assumed that our energy production must happen here on Earth because there's never been an alternative, because we haven't built one. If we use the resources of space, we can create massive, kilometer-scale solar farms in space. These huge facilities will capture the energy of the sun, that shines in space 24 hours a day, and beam that energy back to Earth. The technology to do this exists today, but it's simply too expensive when we try to use the resources of Earth. But if we use the resources in space, we can create planetary-scale macrogrids. You've heard of the electricity grid, maybe you've heard of the microgrid. This is the opposite. This is a planetary-scale, power-generation system. It's the energy that we need and the energy is in space. It's not the resources buried under our feet. So we have water, fuel, construction capabilities, now power, we have all of the utilities we need to build cities in space. Orbital megastructures spun up to produce artificial gravity so they're livable for large populations. These are emerging today as commercial space stations. They're research labs for sovereign astronauts from around the world; hotels for adventurous tourists, certainly. But the primary function of these facilities will be manufacturing. We will build things in space. It starts with satellites and spacecraft. Why would we want to build satellites in space? Today when we build a satellite, it's constrained by the rocket that takes it to space. It has to be built and designed to fit on top of that rocket. And it has to be designed to survive the violent rocket launch to the atmosphere. (Mimicking a rocket) (Laughter) But if we remove that constraint, we can build things that are as big as our imagination and vastly more capable. And if we've come this far, we can take the final step and we can start to solve our resource crisis. We can move our industrial manufacturing into space, all of it. You see, manufacturing is resource consumption. We use the resources of Earth, we turn them into manufactured products, so we can sell them and do useful things. That is what drives commerce on Earth. But what if we reverse that? What if we gather and harvest all of our raw materials and resources from deep space and import them to an orbital manufacturing ring around the planet, and then return only the finished products to the surface? Let's use your smartphone as an example. This was created using raw materials from Earth. Yet, every single one of the raw materials in this exists in infinite quantities in space. The most expensive component of your phone is platinum, and platinum is readily available in near-earth asteroids passing by us all the time. This is created here on Earth using the resources of Earth, in a factory that produces emissions, consumes resources. They use toxic chemicals like benzene to produce this. And that factory produces hazardous waste that's the byproduct of manufacturing. That's the bad stuff: poisons, toxins, heavy metals, radiation. The problem is all of the hazardous waste from manufacturing is stuck with us here in the finite ecosystem that we live in. It's poisoning our air, our water, our fish, our wildlife, our food our kids! Do you know where this should not be made? (Laughter) (Breathing in) (Breathing out) (Laughter) In the only breathable atmosphere that we know of anywhere, a resource that we take for granted every minute of every day. So if we do this, we reverse the human supply chain, we push all of our mining and manufacturing outside the atmosphere, what have we done? We've now zoned the Earth for residential access only. Imagine if you walked outside one day and there were no factories, no power plants, no refineries, no oil rigs, no pipelines to protest, and instead we simply allowed the planet to return to a more natural state, we intentionally stabilized our environment. We'd have more space here on Earth, more room for the population, because we're not trying to live on top of our consumable resource base. And to be clear, this is not a vision about scarcity. And yes, we still have to conserve all of the precious resources we have here at home. But this is a vision about abundance. It's about having access to all of the resources we need to grow as a civilization. They're simply coming from a different place. Now, I know, I know this sounds impossible, but it's happening fast, faster than you could ever imagine, and it's already started. My kids are two. By the time they're in high school, they will see operational asteroid mines. They'll grow up in a world knowing that the resources we need do not simply come from only this planet. As a parent this gives me a lot of hope, because I want to create a world for those kids that gets better and better, not worse and worse. And when someone asks them, "Why we should be exploring space when we have so many problems here at home?", they will know the answer to that. The resources of space are the solutions to our greatest problems. It is only by exploring space that we safeguard this world, the one that matters the most. This is what I ask of you: believe that this is possible, because for the very first time in human history, it is possible. When we access the infinite resources of space, we do so so we can protect and preserve the single most important asset that we know of anywhere in the universe, the only place that we know of that can support human life: our home, Earth. Thank you. (Applause)

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations

ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
resource consumption 3
raw materials 3
dominant species 2
longer suitable 2
billion people 2
infinite quantities 2
solar system 2
resource base 2
hazardous waste 2
exploring space 2

Important Words

  1. abundance
  2. access
  3. adventurous
  4. affordable
  5. air
  6. allowed
  7. alter
  8. alternative
  9. amassed
  10. amount
  11. answer
  12. anymore
  13. applause
  14. artificial
  15. asks
  16. assembled
  17. asset
  18. assumed
  19. asteroid
  20. asteroids
  21. astronauts
  22. atmosphere
  23. auditorium
  24. autonomous
  25. bad
  26. base
  27. batteries
  28. beam
  29. begins
  30. beings
  31. benzene
  32. big
  33. bigger
  34. billion
  35. biological
  36. breathable
  37. breathing
  38. build
  39. building
  40. built
  41. buried
  42. byproduct
  43. capabilities
  44. capable
  45. capture
  46. case
  47. chain
  48. cheap
  49. chemicals
  50. cities
  51. civilization
  52. clear
  53. coal
  54. cobalt
  55. collapse
  56. comets
  57. coming
  58. commerce
  59. commercial
  60. company
  61. component
  62. computing
  63. conserve
  64. consistently
  65. constrained
  66. constraint
  67. construction
  68. consumable
  69. consume
  70. consumes
  71. consuming
  72. consumption
  73. converted
  74. cost
  75. create
  76. created
  77. crisis
  78. critical
  79. data
  80. day
  81. deep
  82. definition
  83. demand
  84. depots
  85. designed
  86. destination
  87. destroy
  88. dispatch
  89. dollars
  90. dominant
  91. drill
  92. driver
  93. drives
  94. earth
  95. ecosystem
  96. electrical
  97. electricity
  98. emerging
  99. emissions
  100. energy
  101. engineers
  102. environment
  103. equivalent
  104. europe
  105. exists
  106. expand
  107. expensive
  108. experts
  109. explorers
  110. exploring
  111. facilities
  112. factor
  113. factories
  114. factory
  115. farms
  116. fast
  117. faster
  118. feed
  119. feet
  120. fiction
  121. field
  122. final
  123. find
  124. finished
  125. finite
  126. fish
  127. fit
  128. fob
  129. food
  130. fuel
  131. fuels
  132. function
  133. future
  134. gas
  135. gather
  136. good
  137. granted
  138. gravity
  139. greatest
  140. grid
  141. grow
  142. growing
  143. grows
  144. happen
  145. happening
  146. harvest
  147. hazardous
  148. head
  149. heads
  150. heard
  151. heavy
  152. high
  153. history
  154. hold
  155. home
  156. hope
  157. hotels
  158. hours
  159. house
  160. huge
  161. human
  162. humans
  163. hydrogen
  164. hygiene
  165. imagination
  166. imagine
  167. impact
  168. import
  169. important
  170. impossible
  171. improve
  172. incredible
  173. industrial
  174. inefficiencies
  175. infinite
  176. intelligence
  177. intentionally
  178. international
  179. involves
  180. iron
  181. key
  182. kids
  183. knowing
  184. labs
  185. land
  186. landed
  187. large
  188. largest
  189. laughter
  190. launch
  191. launched
  192. life
  193. limited
  194. liquid
  195. livable
  196. live
  197. living
  198. load
  199. loaded
  200. logistical
  201. longer
  202. lot
  203. macrogrids
  204. manufactured
  205. manufacturing
  206. mass
  207. massive
  208. materials
  209. matters
  210. means
  211. megastructures
  212. metal
  213. metals
  214. meteorite
  215. microgrid
  216. mimicking
  217. minerals
  218. mines
  219. mining
  220. minute
  221. moon
  222. move
  223. natural
  224. nature
  225. nickel
  226. object
  227. ocean
  228. oil
  229. operational
  230. orbital
  231. oxygen
  232. panels
  233. parent
  234. part
  235. partnerships
  236. pass
  237. passing
  238. people
  239. phone
  240. pipelines
  241. place
  242. plan
  243. planet
  244. planetary
  245. planets
  246. plants
  247. platinum
  248. plumbing
  249. point
  250. poisoning
  251. poisons
  252. poles
  253. population
  254. populations
  255. power
  256. precious
  257. presents
  258. preserve
  259. prevent
  260. primary
  261. problem
  262. problems
  263. produce
  264. produces
  265. production
  266. products
  267. propellant
  268. protect
  269. protest
  270. prove
  271. proven
  272. pure
  273. push
  274. put
  275. quantities
  276. quickly
  277. race
  278. radiation
  279. raw
  280. readily
  281. reason
  282. reduce
  283. refineries
  284. remains
  285. remove
  286. reproduce
  287. research
  288. residential
  289. resource
  290. resources
  291. return
  292. reverse
  293. rigs
  294. ring
  295. robotic
  296. robots
  297. rocket
  298. rockets
  299. room
  300. roughly
  301. running
  302. safeguard
  303. satellite
  304. satellites
  305. save
  306. scarcity
  307. scary
  308. scenario
  309. school
  310. science
  311. scientists
  312. sell
  313. send
  314. sense
  315. set
  316. severe
  317. shame
  318. shines
  319. ship
  320. show
  321. shower
  322. sights
  323. silicon
  324. simply
  325. single
  326. sitting
  327. size
  328. smartest
  329. smartphone
  330. solar
  331. solutions
  332. solve
  333. sounds
  334. source
  335. sourcing
  336. sovereign
  337. space
  338. spacecraft
  339. species
  340. spun
  341. stabilized
  342. start
  343. started
  344. starts
  345. state
  346. states
  347. station
  348. stations
  349. step
  350. store
  351. strategic
  352. strong
  353. structures
  354. stuck
  355. study
  356. suitable
  357. sun
  358. supply
  359. support
  360. surface
  361. survive
  362. sustenance
  363. system
  364. takes
  365. technological
  366. technology
  367. time
  368. today
  369. toolkit
  370. top
  371. tourists
  372. toxic
  373. toxins
  374. turn
  375. turned
  376. united
  377. universe
  378. unstable
  379. utilities
  380. vantage
  381. vast
  382. vastly
  383. view
  384. viewpoint
  385. violent
  386. vision
  387. walked
  388. waste
  389. water
  390. wildlife
  391. wind
  392. wood
  393. work
  394. working
  395. world
  396. worse
  397. worst
  398. year
  399. zoned